VATICAN CITY – Jerusalem, April 30, morning. The Roman procurator Pontius Pilate he didn’t have a great career if he found himself governing a region, Judea, on the borders of the Empire then led by Tiberius. Not exactly here are the lions, but almost. The scene probably takes place in the Palace of Herod the Greaton the western hill, near the present Jaffa Gate.
In front of the “praetorium”, for the prosecutor to judge him, they dragged him a thirty-year-old Jewish preacher from Galileea rabbi from Nazareth, perhaps a rioter, go find out. Such Yehoshua ben Yosefin the abbreviated form Yeshua. Another sentence, one of many.
Pilate, in office for four years, does not understand the people he despises, reciprocated. And he cannot imagine that from that day his choice and his name will be linked to most famous and sensational judicial case in the history of humanityto make even Socrates pale.
A trial that ends in a few hours with the sentence of capital punishment, in the cruelest and most infamous form: crucifixion. But what did Jesus do for his accusers? What are the charges? What is he found guilty of?
Historical sources and the false accusation of deicide
Two thousand years of analysis, thousands of books and often nefarious interpretations. The Catholic Church has its responsibilities, and they are enormous. Until the Second Vatican Council, the senseless accusation of “deicide” was placed upon the Jewish peoplea matrix of anti-Judaism that has caused centuries of persecution and pogroms.
As Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi stated in his book Biography of Jesusit is good first of all to cite the conciliar declaration Our Aetate of 28 October 1965, which finally marked the turning point of the Church: «If Jewish authorities with their followers worked for the death of Christ, however what was committed during his passion cannot be attributed to all Jews without distinction then living nor to the Jews of our time.” Senseless accusation, also because in this story they are all Jews: Jesus like his accusers, those who cry “crucify him!” like Mary, the disciples, the evangelists (only there is some doubt about Luke, tradition speaks of pagan origins, but it is considered more likely that he was a Hellenist Jew from Antioch), the primitive Christian community. Apart from Pilate: who was the only one, as a Roman prosecutor, who could decide the death penalty.
And then historical reconstruction is not easy. The process is attested in Jewish antiquities (XVIII) by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, who in one passage quotes Jesus and writes: “After Pilate, upon accusation from the major leaders of our people, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him from the beginning did not fail.” Even the Roman historian Tacitin Annals (XV), writes of the «atrocious torments» inflicted by Nero on the Christians and explains that they «took their name from Christ, sentenced to death by the prosecutor Pontius Pilate under the empire of Tiberius.”
For the rest, the only sources are the four Gospels, which, however, were not written with historical intentread the events in the light of faith in the resurrection of Jesus and turn to particular communities (Mark to an environment of pagan origins, Matthew to Judeo-Christians of the Hellenistic diaspora, Luke to the Greco-Roman world, John to the Greek one) who often they have difficult and polemical relationships with the Jewish environment from which they have separated themselves.
An example of this is the relative indulgence with which Pilate is described. Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish philosopher of the time, offers some in the De Legatione ad Caium a slightly different portrait: «A man by nature inflexible and, in addition to his arrogance, harsh, capable only of extortion, violence, robbery, brutality, torture, executions without trial and appalling and unlimited cruelty».
Josephus Flavius always in Jewish antiquitiesrecounts the massacres of the people ordered by Pilate to his soldiers.
The accusation and the first trial before the Sanhedrin
However, in the story of the evangelists there are two processes. The first is celebrated in front of the Sanhedrin, a Greek word that means assembly, assembly. In Athens it was the college made up of a magistrate and his advisors. In the Jerusalem of the time it was the political-religious body responsible for the Jewish administration, very relatively autonomous, recognized but dependent on the authority of the occupying Roman power. It was composed of seventy members plus the high priest who presided over it. Three classes were represented: the priests, the elderly who belonged to a sort of secular and landed aristocracy and, like priests, were Sadducees, of a conservative orientation; and finally the scribes, the Pharisee scholars, more open and progressive, despite the representation that the Gospels make of them.
On the night of Judas’ betrayal, Jesus was arrested in the farm called Gethsemane, “olive press”, by a “crowd with swords and clubs” sent by the Sanhedrin authorities. He is brought before the former high priest Annas and then by his son-in-law Caiaphas, the current high priest and therefore head of the Sanhedrin. It is at Caiaphas’ house that the first meeting takes place. The four Gospels vary in their narrative, but the substance does not change. At the beginning they accuse him of having said “destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it again”, a phrase which Jesus had also referred to himself and “to the temple of his body”, notes John. But the decisive moment is when Caiaphas asks him: «Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?». The oldest Gospel, that of Mark, which is believed to have been written before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, reports the defendant’s response: «I am. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”. It is at this point that the high priest tears his clothes and exclaims: «What need do we have of other witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy; what do you think?”. And the assembly of the Sanhedrin responds: «he is guilty of death!».
Caiaphas’ reaction is not hysterical, tearing one’s clothes is a ritual gesture in the face of ignominy. But what did Jesus say that was so serious? He replied that he was the Messiah awaited by Israel (Mashiah«anointed» with sacred oil and therefore consecrated: in Greek ChristosChrist) and, what is worse in the eyes of the Sanhedrin, he did so by quoting a passage from the prophet Daniel (7) which presents in the “Son of Man”, a not only earthly figure who mysteriously participates in the divine nature. But there’s more. The original Greek text of Mark reports Jesus’ response «egò eimi», which is generally translated «I am» but literally means «I am»: the same response of God when Moses asks his name, addressing the burning bush on Mount Horeb, the tetragrammaton YHWH (Jod, He, Waw , He) which the Jews do not pronounce. «The gospel leads to this self-testimony of his, which resolves every mystery and will be the cause of his condemnation», writes the great Jesuit biblical scholar Silvano Fausti in his commentary on Mark: «Jesus will be condemned not for the testimony of others, but for this revelation of his».
Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI also notes this in his Jesus of Nazareth: «Doesn’t Exodus 3.14 resonate with you?». Effectively. There is enough for the Sanhedrin, but the assembly does not have the power to pass sentences. So Jesus is brought to Pilate.
The second trial before Pilate
From the Sanhedrin to praetorium, the place of judgment. In the Gospel of Luke it is said that Pilate, distrustful, tried in vain to pass the judgment on Herod, prosecutor of Galilee, who sent the accused back. In any case, to obtain the conviction, a more political accusation is presented to the Roman procurator of Judea by the representatives of the assembly: «We found this man stirring up our people, preventing them from giving tribute to Caesar and claiming to be Christ the King». It will be the final motivation for the condemnation, which was placed on the vertical arm of the cross as a warning to anyone who wanted to rebel against Roman power: “The King of the Jews”, the acronym INRI which in the Latin language of the empire is found in countless paintings and sculptures : «Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum».
Marco’s version is the driest. Pilate asks: «Are you the king of the Jews?». Jesus replies: «You say so». Pilate insists, Jesus no longer responds. But in Jerusalem these are the days of the Jewish Passover, for the holiday the prosecutor “used to release a prisoner” and at that moment there is also a certain Barabbas, “he was in prison together with the rebels who had committed a murder in the tumult”, in short a revolutionary true politician, probably a zealot. The scene is very famous: Pilate addresses the crowd, “Do you want me to release the king of the Jews to you?”, but the crowd, “incited by the high priests”, instead invokes Barabbas. And when Pilate asks what to do with Jesus, “What harm has he done?”, the crowd replies: “Crucify him!”.
The “crucifier!”
And here there is a serious problem: who invokes Barabbas and asks for the crucifixion of Jesus? Mark, the oldest text, speaks of «óchlos», in Greek the «crowd» or «mass», precisely, a group of people probably made up of supporters of Barabbas. It is the only Gospel of Matthew that speaks of «Laos», which means «people» or «nation». All major biblical scholars and theologians agree: it is an exaggeration of Matthew. Indeed, “an amplification that is fatal in its consequences”, notes Joseph Ratzinger, who in his Jesus of Nazareth clarifies: «Matthew certainly does not express a historical fact: how could all the people have been present at such a moment to ask for the death of Jesus? The historical reality certainly appears correctly in John and Mark.”
If Mark speaks of a crowd, John indicates the “Jews” in the sense of the “aristocracy of the temple”, Benedict XVI is definitive: “The true group of accusers are the contemporary circles of the temple and, in the context of the Easter amnesty, they associate to them the “mass” of Barabbas’ supporters”. Historically, the tendency of the first Christians remains “to attenuate Pilate’s responsibilities and to highlight the Jewish ones”, as Ravasi notes. Above all, Matteo, the most controversial with his compatriots, who reports the scene of the prosecutor washing his hands and saying: “I’m not responsible for this blood, you can deal with it!”. And he adds – here too, he alone among the evangelists – the response of the “people”, which goes so far as to say: “Let her blood be on us and on our children”.
Above all, the fact remains that the responsibility for the death sentence lies with the Roman procuratorMark writes: «Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them and, after having Jesus scourged, handed him over to be crucified».
The execution
Jesus is handed over to the Roman garrison to be scourged. It is the story of the Passion which in a large part of the world, on Good Friday, marks the Via Crucis. The Romans used a flagrum with thick strings with pieces of bone and metal. The mockery, the torture. On the ascent to Golgotha, the soldiers stop a certain Simon of Cyrene to bring the patibulum, the transverse axis of the cross. The vertical one is already planted at the execution site. The condemned man is hung on the cross, nailed by the wrists. The Greek word agony it means struggle, for a crucifix it is long and painful. At the end, a soldier holds out a sponge soaked in “vinegar” to the dying Jesus, in reality a wine mixed with water that soldiers and reapers used to quench their thirst: what popularly appears as the last gesture of mockery could instead be an extreme gesture of compassion. «Tetelestai», is the last word of Jesus reported by John: «”It is finished”, he said. And, bowing his head, he expired.”
